Slowly but surely, school boards around the country are having to address bathroom policies for transgender students. Here in Virginia, several schools were already quietly handling the issue with advice from the RVA-based LGBTQ youth support group ROSMY, but a group of Christian advocates in Hanover is pushing back.

“… You must not permit our children to be used as political pawns by the overly zealous ideologues who have threatened this action in furtherance of their selfish desire to attain sexual egalitarianism through ill-advised social experimentation,” wrote Salt & Light’s counsel C. Felix Cross III. Cross, a Hanover attorney, went on to say he and his group has compassion for “those students who suffer from the assumptive disorder of transgenderism,” but “it is wrong to suppress the truth and withhold the medical attention they require.”

Cross’s use of the term “disorder of transgenderism” fails to recognize the updated Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the DSM) which changed the condition of “Gender identity disorder” to the less stigmatized term “gender dysphoria” in 2013. Those new guidelines are more supportive of transgender people’s medical needs and note that the most dangerous and negative sides of gender dysphoria are not the “mental illness” it was once considered, but rather from the negative reactions people with GD experience from those around them.

Cross said his statement comes from 280 members of his organization, and it seeks the school board to ignore the federal guidelines, which Cross called a “continuing effort to remove God’s natural law from our culture.”

Hanover County’s nondiscrimination policy doesn’t not specifically list sexual orientation or gender identity as protected classes, however it does include gender which is what the Obama administration and the fed has often used to defend transgender protections.

The next school board meeting is set for June 14th, 7 PM, at 200 Berkley Street, Ashland, VA. Anyone is welcome to attend however the agenda for the meeting has not been published yet so we cannot confirm if bathroom policies will be on the schedule.

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